Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of scenarios to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information.
Some conventional storage approaches attempt to utilize thin storage to provision a primary storage resource (e.g., primary volume group, etc.). The virtual nature of thin storage can offer some flexibility to create a very large volume (e.g., storage container for the filesystem, etc.). Some of the thin provisioning capable intelligent storage arrays deploy ZPR (zero page reclaim) techniques to reclaim unused application data. However, this approach usually does not work well for many commonly used applications (e.g., databases, etc.). Reclamation is often particularly problematic for applications that initialize datafiles with non-zero blocks. This can be done to make sure a filesystem allocates storage for the entire data file and during table creation it need not worry about out of space situations. When the table is deleted and or purged, the freed blocks are added to the tablespace free list and not usually initialized to zero. These characteristics can make it difficult to reclaim unused blocks within a data file.
Some of the conventional storage approaches attempt to reclaim storage resources that are associated with a filesystem but are not assigned to an application. However, conventional attempts to reclaim storage resources that are assigned to an application data file are often complicated and difficult. The traditional approaches typically involve moving application data, shrinking the files (e.g., including coalescing table freespace via SQL and migrating free blocks to the end of a file, online redefinition of a table into a new container and deleting data from old location, etc.), and attempting to reallocate remaining free space back to the filesystem, after which an attempt is made to reclaim the storage spaces that were reallocated or reassigned to the filesystem. These attempts are often resource intensive and usually limited in flexibility with regards to reclaiming storage resources (e.g., they can take a long time, application performance can suffer, etc.).